Virtual NEPC: Matthew Johnson, Monica Ong, Cindy Veach
The NEPC rounds out our 2026 programs with a special Zoom presentation, featuring Club members from North Carolina (Matthew Johnson) and Washington State (Cindy Veach), and the visual poetry of Monica Ong.
Matthew Johnson is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Jackie Robinson’s Real Gone: Baseball Poems of New York (Cornerstone Press). His poetry has appeared in Apple Valley Review, Heavy Feather Review, Langston Hughes Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. A recipient of multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, support from the Emily Dickinson Museum and Hudson Valley Writers Center, as well as a finalist for the Diverse Voices Book Award (Grand View University) and E.E. Cummings Poetry Award (New England Poetry Club), he’s the managing editor of Portrait of New England and the poetry editor of The Twin Bill. www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com
Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025) with a foreword by John Yau. You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over sixty distinguished institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.
Cindy Veach is the author of three poetry collections: Monster Galaxy (MoonPath Press), a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award; Her Kind (CavanKerry Press), an Eric Hoffer Award Montaigne Medal finalist; and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and Massachusetts Center for the Book “Must Read.” Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, Cindy serves as poetry editor for MER—Mom Egg Review.
Important: the reading is free, but advance registration is required. To register, visit https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/cpLlNHWdTt6xLHhRRNddqA. After you register, you will receive an email with your personal Zoom link for the session. Please note that there will be no “one-size-fits-all” Zoom link for everyone. We look forward to seeing you online!